The Visiting Writers Series at Hope College will conclude its 1999-2000 season with a reading by Luis J. Rodriguez and Susan Atefat Peckham on Monday, April 17, at 7 p.m. in Dimnent Memorial Chapel.

Live music by the Hope College Jazz Chamber Ensemble will precede the reading beginning at 6:30 p.m. The public is invited. Admission is free. Luis Rodriguez, best known for his memoir "Always Running: La Vida Loca, Gang Days in L.A." (1993), speaks around the world to campuses and communities with standing- room only audiences. He bases his nonfiction and poetry on past experiences as a teenage gangbanger. By the time he was 18, he had lost 25 of his friends and family to suicide, murder and other acts of senseless violence. He began his own memoir as a 16-year-old, and was motivated to complete it as his own son joined a gang in Chicago, Ill. "Always Running" won the Carl Sandburg Literary Award, and has also been recognized with a Lila Wallace- Reader's Digest Writer's Award, a Chicago Sun-Times Book Award, and several other fellowships and prizes. Rodriguez lives in Chicago as a peacemaker among inner city gangs, as he runs "Tia Church Press," which publishes emerging, socially conscious poets. Susan Atefat Peckham is in her first year as a member of the Hope faculty, teaching creative writing as an assistant professor of English. Her own writing is flavored by her diverse background. She was born first-generation American to Iranian parents, and has lived most of her life in France and Switzerland, although she has also lived for periods in Iran as well as the United States. Her work has appeared, or is forthcoming, in "The International Poetry Review," "International Quarterly," "The Literary Review," "The MacGuffin," "Onthebus," "Prairie Schooner," "Puerto Del Sol," "The Southern Poetry Review," "The Sycamore Review" and "The Texas Review." She will be anthologized next year in "In A Field of Words" (Prentice Hall), and has been the recipient of various fellowships and awards. She was previously at the University of Nebraska, where she earned her doctorate and taught creative writing, literature and composition. She also served as an editorial assistant for "Prairie Schooner Literary Magazine."